Swing Your Partner!

Greetings Friends! Hope you all had a good weekend, it was nice to get back into the swing of school and routine! We started with morning meeting and Rockin' Robin, along with the "swing your partner" greeting! Pretty awesome singing, I might add! Nice meeting! We learned how to stretch our words in writing workshop, and how to listen for the sounds in words, so that we can become self-governed, independent writers. We all know that writers like to use big, fancy words too, and when you're not sure how to spell the word that's JUST RIGHT for your story, you can sound it out... instead of using a smaller simpler word. We LOVE writing big words, they make stories GREAT! Spelling certainly is important, but while writers are crafting a story, we want to support the writing process, and the big ideas in stories! That's why we sound out the word, and circle it after. Chances are pretty good it may be spelled incorrectly, but when we circle the word, we can always go back, and fix it up! That's why they call it writing workshop! It's about the writing "PROCESS" and becoming independent writers! One brave friend sounded out (stretched out) 6 words in his story, and was willing to share his writing in another author's share. Writers who practice the skills we learn will often be asked to share their writing, as long as they are willing, and that helps everybody's learning! Well done Julienne!!
We also learned how to do math center jobs on the work board, and are just about ready to launch our first work board! WOW!! I can't wait! Math center jobs will always be different, and will be something that we've already learned, and can practice independently (while Ms. Worthley meets with reading groups)! Well done! Our student teacher from UMass, Katelyn was here again today, and watched us write equations with beans to help us practice our math facts. Katelyn will be with us until December, and she LOVES her time with us! We're lucky to have her, and to help foster her learning process as well! We predicted how many different math facts (equations) we'd have using only 10 beans, and we had 11 facts all together! Great job second graders!
Afternoons are l-o-n-g in second grade this year, but we launched our spelling program with short a words! More on this at Open House, October 4! Hope to see you all there! We also added a fluency piece to our homework with a poem. Students can practice reading their poem at least one time, each night. By Friday, they'll sound awesome and might even be willing to read in front of all their peers! Get a good sleep friends, we have a special event tomorrow morning. Dino-Man! Cool! PE in the afternoon, sneakers please!